Nothing to apologise about - it's good of you to want to help. Sorry I didn't reply sooner, I'm not online as much as I'd like these days. Did you actually plan to model low-poly collision or just convert the mesh? EDIT: Yes - there is vertex coloring - not too heavy but I used it to make some tone variation across the walls and roof and to shade around the timbers. There's a bit more of it in my newer version but I'm not quite ready to do the export on that yet

Hi Hannes - TOYB now tells me he really does want collisioned versions sooner rather than later so I'm pleased you're able to help out. I just didn't want you to put in the effort of making proper optimised collisions on what is still a changing set, but if you don't mind the potential rework then I'll just let you know when there are changes.

I am still working on these: the parts I have shown and more are already implemented in an esp which I sent to Rob & 1ShoedPunk a month ago and needs merging - although there will be more added. I really would rather you did not start messing with these unless the project absolutely needs the collisioned version right now - because I will be replacing all the parts with revised pieces as soon as I can and you will only have to relink them. I can't think of any reason why collisioned versions would be needed yet, though. I also intend to do the collisioning which will be a lot simpler in my master Blender flles where I can work with the underlying components rather than back-converting from Nif to Blender/Max and then poly-reducing from there. I'm not ruling out changes that would break any added collision, and there are a number of additional pieces in the works. I was planning do collision at the same time as the distant-LOD versions of the models since the low-poly remodelling can be reused. If you are pushing forward with collisioning just because it seems like a nice thing to do - then don't. Too early and a pointless waste of work. If you're a good enough modeller to make collision then there must be better uses for your ability!

Don't have time to be around much at the moment but haven't abandoned the set - These aren't collisioned yet but are otherwise good to go. They're uploaded to Git in the branch beyond-skyrim-heartlands/elsweyr_AnequinaFarmhouses. I intend to add more to the set as time permits

The first tip of course is "look at Bethesda's nif in Nifskope" Ignore the trees - they're entirely different - just look at the flora* meshes. There are two basic types depending on the harvest method. Meshes like floramountainflower01blue.nif are simple intersecting textured planes where the transparency of the "harvestable" parts of the texture is set to around 50%. On harvest, these will be switched from visible to invisible. All the mushroom meshes use the NiSwitchNode technique. For these, there is a different complete version of the mesh, one showing the full object before harvesting and one with it after. These are in two separate NiNode collections under the NiSwitchNode. Harvest switches between them. The two meshes could be anything of course. Generally, make the whole thing with the harvestable parts in a separate layer in your modelling package, then export once with the whole thing, and once without the harvestable layer. The reason the mushrooms work this way, I think, is so that the texture can be re-used for harvested and non-harvested parts of the mesh. Potato works this way too - this time it's so the entire plant can disappear leaving disturbed soil and roots behind. Either way, build your new plant up by modifying a Bethsoft original mesh, replacing the NiTriShapes by copying them over from your exported Nif. Your Bergamot will probably need to work something like Spiky Grass - floraspikygrass01.nif. The seed head and stalk are fully modelled and their part of the texture has the alpha set to the grey level 0x8C - slightly over 50%. The foliage is a bunch bent-up of 2-D sheets textured with the grass leaves. If you make your seed pods' texture half transparent like that but leave the stems, leaves and flowers fully opaque then the pods will disappear at harvest but the landscape will still look unchanged. Also makes the player actually have to look for whether they've harvested the plant or not! By the way, Bethesda frequently use BSLODTriShapes - but I wouldn't bother. It's a pain trying to get the vertices in the right order to get LOD fading to work and it makes minimal difference to performance anyway. If you have several sub-meshes then nest them as NiTriShapes under an NiNode - if you get it all into one single mesh then just have an NiTriShape (like the mountain flower) directly under the BSLeafAnimNode Ah, yes: BSLeafAnimNode. That's what makes it animated. Mushrooms just use the static BSFadeNodes but anything leafy needs to sway. Flora animation works by distorting the mesh. You must set the mesh to be smoothed, otherwise it tends to treat the vertices separately and bits of your leaf will split apart in the wind. Similarly, you can't animate the stem or seed pods: they will bulge weirdly. Flowers can have animated petals, but not the centre. The extent of the animation is governed by the transparency of the vertex shading on the mesh. You turn the wind effect on by setting the shader flag 1 value SLSF1_Vertex_Alpha using NifSkope. If the vertex is fully transparent then it will not be deformed by the wind. If it's fully opaque then it will get the full effect of the wind as assigned through the CK. By setting the stem and base of each leaf to transparent and the tips of the leaves opaque you get a nice progressive effect. This depends on your modelling program. I'm pretty sure 3DS Max can do vertex alpha natively, but I don't know the program. Blender does not support transparency in vertex shading but I wrote a work-around script for Blender 2.49a that I used. That's about it for the brain-dump - it's quite simple to do once you get the workflow sorted out, just quite hard to work out in the first place. Also I don't know how much the existing bergamot has been used - but make sure you get rid of it by replacing the nif with a new one of the same name. Make a version that has maybe three or so stems and a bit of general foliage that can replace the old mesh as already placed, and ideally make a second version with rather more stems to make nice new clumps. Don't leave the old mesh lying around with the old name: I made that mistake with Flax and we still haven't gotten rid of the ugly old one.

The existing bergamot - bskflorabergamot.nif - really is not very good. I can say that with confidence because it's one of the models I tried to salvage from another submission and really wish I hadn't bothered! It's an oblivion-style single stem rather than a Skyrim-style clump and has no leaf animation. It really needs replacing completely but I will not have time to do it so from my viewpoint you're welcome to give it a go. Don't forget the ingredient is "bergamot seeds" - so the nicest implementation would have seed heads (look them up: quite interesting) which disappear on harvest, while leaving the pretty flowers ... ready for the next harvest. I'm not on the forum much at the moment - but let me know if you want a few tips on creating plants. There are two ways to do the harvest for a start, and leaf animation requires alpha-channel vertex shading.

It's strange to poke around in the inside of a troll or an elemental and get a bowl out! It's a game mechanic and everyone's used to it. A bag is easier to work with when cluttering - but I have no particularly fixed view, just as long as it's seeds.

Totally agree with you. The error clearly wasn't yours - but this is a lore issue. Nobody here would suggest giving Mehrunes Dagon a mace, or claiming White Gold Tower was built by Dwemer - and this would be no less a violation of established lore. It's why I made a point of commenting on it in the original post! Flax seed should be cheap stuff - so I would think a bag would be fine. It just means more modelling effort, which again is why I haven't had a chance to do it myself.

Flowers in vases is a great idea - and they are lovely models which as Darkestorne says, could be used decoratively. But - we can't just go changing what the ingredients are for classic items like Flax: Bethesda won't have picked flax seed by accident: It's real stuff, sold as a food supplement with reputed health benefits. And with a retexed bowl it wouldn't take a texture artist very long to knock up a lore-correct ingredient.

That's very nice - but from Oblivion (and as it says in the original post above) the ingredient for all flax should be "flax seeds" not different colours of flax flower. I also made the flax so that the flowers stay on the plant when harvested and the small brown seed pods are removed. I don't know if or when I'll get time to make the flax seeds myself though. When I did have time I got rather stuck on whether the seeds should be a sort of loose pile or be in a bowl like some of the other loose ingredients. In Oblivion they're modelled as a collection of rather over-large individual seeds so that's possibly the way to go: The alternative would be either a pile or bowl of smaller seeds as texture. A retex of something like Troll Fat would actually work fine for the latter.

This is rather like doing a line drawing of a Rembrandt and saying "Now, if someone would just color this in I won't mind...." Generating the erosion is at least half the job: it has to vary by region and elevation; and ideally take account of geology and hydrology or at least some approximation to them. I found Wilbur to be way too heavy-handed, although it was useful to take the output and blend it back into the heightmap modelling process. Rob, the -x -64 -y -64 in the TesAnnwyn command line is what sets the origin - and looks right to me. If it's not centred then that's where your problem is. The height offset is the -h parameter but that changes the heightmap elevation. You will need to correct the WRLD record in TES5Edit to set the water level. I don't think TESAnnwyn makes the WRLD record properly anyway: again, you'll do best to copy the original. Oh - and if that's 8-bit-to-16-bit terracing, it's really hard to get rid of once it's there because it tracks constant-elevation strata across the landscape and the eye picks that up in-game however you try to disguise it. You'd do better to go back to the first 16-bit stage and put a big(ger?) blur over the entire landscape then add proper detailing using a decent erosion tool. I gather GeoControl is good but never got on with it myself.

Looks like byte-order to me. Raw files consist of 16-bit integers - ie 2 bytes - but the bytes can be either way round: little one first or big one first. I always forget which order is needed - but you have the wrong one.

Trying to remember what I've encountered doing this in the past - I have a feeling OScape needs esm files to work properly. Otherwise there's a whole process you need to go through to duplicate the ground texture definitions into the active esp - the bit in Hoddminir's initial "Duplicating textures in the CK (optional)" section. I think the convert to tga bit is only required for object lod not the terrain. Also, did you make Skyrim.esm one of the active plugins during the extract process - that might have been relevant too.... OScape definitely does work to do exactly what you want: if it's not working for you then it's not the program that's failing....!

I haven't looked at Transbot's Tamriel heightmap but it makes sense he's have used the full range of z-values available. TESAnnwyn uses signed numbers, so for a 16-bit input file it treats any number over 32767 as negative: 32768 will be treated as -32768. Graphics packages generally use unsigned numbers: there's no such thing as negative brightness! You should be able to play with the scale parameter -s to get what you need with a minor loss of vertical resolution, though. The docs say it can handle 32-bit input files - I don't know how you go about generating them.